Update, Olympics, and Curling

Another long stretch without an update. I finally have pictures from WDW ready to put online, when I get around to it. Maybe next week.

Olympics

The Olympics are coming! Yesterday they unveiled the Vancouver 2010 Olympic medals. The medals themselves in recent games have been one of the most visible ways for the host country to showcase their individuality. From the donut-holes of Torino, to the jade-inlaid medals of Beijing, the 2010 medals are no exception, recognizing the Aboriginal roots of the Pacific coast of Canada. On first glance they may look rather artistic, yet traditional.

That is until you look at them from the side and realize they are far from ordinary -- and far from flat!

Rather amusing. I actually like them a lot. Too bad I'll never get one. :)

Curling

In related news (well, related only because curling is an Olympic sport), the curling season has started again. This year I'm curling on Tuesday and Friday nights, which should give me a bit more manageable schedule (to fit in everything else that's going on in the world). I'm once again managing the Friday night league, because it's still fun. We'll see how many more years until I give up on that. :)

Huskies

How 'bout them Dawgs? Who would have possibly expected we would be 3-3 halfway through the season. Well, perhaps me, but it wasn't the 3 wins I was expecting to have. Husky Stadium has come alive again, in a way I haven't seen since the beginning of the decade. And maybe, just maybe, I'll be able to make some holiday plans this year to go find a football game to go to. We'll see.

This will mark the beginning of a new round of blog posting. I hope. I just have to get in the habit of it again. I'm trying not to leave my were-to-be-avid readers waiting. Until then...

Long Overdue Updates

A month and a half without an update.  Certainly not for a lack of things to write about.  

Curling

Curling season ended the first week of April, but over Memorial Day weekend, I went down to a summer bonspiel in Hollywood.  It was a nice way to spend the weekend, and my team managed to nearly win, only losing in the A finals for a 2nd place finish.  Not so bad!  But now I'm definitely done curling until the fall.  

Never-ending Car Challenges

This story could be a 5-page blog unto itself, but here it goes.  I loved my car, a 2001 Nissan Altima, built like a tank, over the past almost 7 years hadn't had a single breakdown, no major expenses other than routine maintenance, and most importantly it was reliable.  Until recently.  Back on Christmas Eve, driving home over the horrendously icy roads, my dashboard lights up like a Christmas tree (festive, right?).  I make it home without any trouble, still perplexed as to what the problem was, though by the indicators, it seemed to be something electrical.   Day after Christmas I decide to drive over to Schuck's to get a new battery, assuming that was the problem.  Just as I get a block from the store, one-by-one every electrical component in my car starts to shut down.  As I pull into the Schuck's parking lot, the car dies completely.  I replace the battery in the parking lot, and the car starts up again, but no difference in the dashboard lights.  The guy there brings out his tester and determines that my alternator is dead.  I had enough in juice in the new battery to get me over to the Nissan dealer, and I got the alternator replaced, and thought all was fine.  Then two days later, I'm at home and try to start my car, and the battery is dead.  I get it jumped and go back to the dealer that replaced my alternator, and they claim the problem was the battery (that I bought new at Schucks).  Instead of messing with it, I had them replace the battery and I would just take the defective battery back to Schuck's.  I tried that, and they hooked it onto their tester and said everything was fine.  Something didn't add up, the chain of logic wasn't there to me, but I went with it.  The car proceeded to work flawlessly.  

Fast forward to May.  First free weekend I'd had in months, I decide to get up and drive to Canada in search of some Olympics merchandise and just a nice drive.  Had a great time, start to head home, when I get stuck in stop-and-go traffic getting out of Vancouver.  After about 30 minutes of the traffic, my car starts acting strange.  Next thing I know, one-by-one every electrical component in my car shuts down.  (Sound familiar?)  Moments later, my car is stranded in the middle of a 4-lane street, in who-knows-where suburb of Vancouver in another country.  Resisting the urge to panic TOO much, I call AAA, which automatically gets routed to the CAA offices in Vancouver who take care of me just as if I were still in the States.  Just as I get on the phone with them, a tow truck pulls up behind me, just passing by.  The nice guy reaffirms the obvious that this isn't the best place to be stuck, and he drives onto a side street, unhooks the car he already had on his tow, and then comes back and tows me off to the side street, rehooks the other car and goes on his way.  At least now I'm not in the line of traffic anymore.  Of course, it's 5pm on a Saturday, and every shop in town is closed until Monday.  The best they can do is send out one of their CAA mechanics, who jumped the car and determined that the alternator was undercharging, but if I kept the revs up on the highway, I should make it home.  Lo and behold, that's exactly what I did.  The next week, I took the car back to the Nissan service folks, who proceeded to find ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WRONG WITH THE CAR.  

For the next 2 weeks, I don't know if it was just my own skiddishness worrying that my car was going to break down on me or what, but my car did not run happy.  I'd get stopped at a red light for more than a minute or two, and the engine would start to rev funny, or something else would make me think there was a problem.  I just didn't trust my car.  I was constantly feeling sick whenever I got into my car, no doubt having mild panic attacks worrying about whether it was going to break down in a horrible place again.  

I'd had enough.  I'd been considering getting a new car for a while for other reasons, but this was the last straw.  So that's what I ended up doing.  I bought American this time, and got a 2009 Dodge Journey with about 12,000 miles on it.  Never heard of it?  I hadn't either, but our used car guy who hasn't led me wrong before knew it was what I was looking for, and I think it is.  Though I have to admit, I miss my Altima, at least I trust my car again.  So it goes.  

Muppets

I previously mentioned the new Jim Henson exhibition at EMP|SFM this summer.  Well, as it turned out, I obviously needed something more to add to my summer schedule, so I am now volunteering there once a week.  What they have set up is a puppet stage where people can use some of their specially-made Muppet-like puppets (in the style of famous rock musicians, of course) and try their hand at what it's like to be a Muppeteer.  The volunteers are staffing that area and basically having fun playing with puppets and helping other people doing so.  For the most part, I'll just be there on Wednesday evenings from 4-7pm.  The exhibit is pretty amazing, and well worth seeing!  

Well, I guess I'm caught up with the major stuff, time for more random blogs in the future. 

Denver - Day 7

A late night and an early morning.  I think I got about 6.5 hours of sleep, and morning came around way too soon.  We had the last men's draw this morning, followed by one women's tiebreaker that was necessary for seeding.  At 4pm today we have one men's tiebreaker as well, followed by the 8pm 1v2/3v4 playoffs for the women.  Fortunately, I don't have to work until the 8pm draw tonight, which means naptime is coming up soon. 

And things are getting a bit hectic around here, as NBC just arrived and they're going to start getting things ready to broadcast the semi-finals and finals live on UniversalSports, their new all-Olympic sports station.  You can find it in Seattle on Comcast channel 115, or over the air (if you have digital antenna) on 5.2.  Check local listings for other stations.  For reference, the schedule is:  

Women's Semi-Final: Friday 4pm MST (3pm PST)

Men's Semi-Final:  Friday 8pm MST (7pm PST)

Women's Final: Saturday 10am MST (9am PST)

Men's Final:  Saturday 3pm MST (2pm PST)

I'll be on the ice working the Friday 4pm and Saturday 10am draws, so feel free to look for me if they get bored showing coverage of the teams and I happen to walk by. :)  

Denver - Days 4-6

So busy I haven't had much of a chance to blog updates.  When I've been in the hotel room, it's been mainly to sleep.  But I have a few minutes here so I thought I'd update the past few days.  

Monday was business as usual, working a few draws and finding times to eat and sleep when it was convenient.  

Tuesday was my day to go do some things around Denver.  I started out by heading down to the U.S. Mint and taking a tour.  After going through a fairly intense security screening just to get in the door, we were taken on a short (about 20 minutes of actual stuff to see) walk through a observation deck where we could see the presses churning out pennies by the thousands (through some hefty glass, so we couldn't get our grubby little hands on them).  It was interesting to see the mint in action, and quite a bit of historical coinage and artifacts were on display, but overall I was unimpressed.  The tour was so constrained, there wasn't a whole lot to see and it just wasn't really worth the trouble, I think.  But I did it, so there.  

After that, I walked back downtown to the 16th Street Mall, which is the main shopping street through the middle of downtown Denver.  It's a pedestrian-only street, with the exception of some extremely convenient shuttle buses that continuously travel up and down the street, so you can just hop on and off as you want to quickly get from one end to the other.  Quite impressive.  

I went to the far end of the street, where I found the Colorado State Capitol building.  As it has become one of my quirky trip traditions to stop at every state capitol I come to, I went inside and wandered around the entire place.  Being a weekday, the house and senate were both in session, and I wandered into the viewing gallery to see a bit of the Colorado legislature in action.  They have a partial museum up in the lower part of the dome of the capitol which I went up to see, though unfortunately you can't climb all the way to the top of the dome, there was a viewing deck at the bottom of the dome.  Pretty interesting.  State Capitols are always fun to visit.  

I did some shopping on the 16th Street Mall and worked my way down to the other end of the city and over to Coors Field.  Not much going on there, but it was good to stop by and see where it was.  Finally made my way back to the car and left downtown.  Upon additional recommendations, I decided to drive all the way up to Fort Collins to check out the New Belgium Brewery.  Just a mile away from it happens to be where one of my sisters works.  I stopped by but she had already left for the day.  In any event, I've been on quite a few brewery tours, but the New Belgium brewery tour was by far the most entertaining I've ever taken.  Just a fantastic place.  

Tonight after I finished officiating at the early draw this morning, I drove back to Loveland, just south of Fort Collins, to meet up with my sister and have dinner with her.  It was good, mainly because if I went to Denver and didn't meet up with her, I'd never live it down.  :)  But we had a good time, and then I came back and here I am.  Now heading back over to catch part of the late draw at the trials before finding some more sleep.  Pictures to be posted later, it's always something.

More to come...

Denver - Day 2 and 3

It's been a relatively uneventful first couple of days here at the Olympic Trials.  Getting into the groove and not getting too much relaxing in at this point.  My initial impression that this wouldn't be much of a vacation has been so far true.  I put up a few pictures that I snapped tonight.  Nothing too exciting there either. I'll try to take some better and more interesting shots later in the week.  

This area (Broomfield, CO) is actually quite nice.  I definitely ended up with a winner with the hotel here.  Free made-to-order breakfast every morning (unfortunately, I'm not much of a breakfast person, so it's not exactly the most thrilling feature, and this morning I actually had to be out of here before they even opened), but the biggest advantage is that I'm not more than about 3 minutes away from the ice arena.  Brilliant.  I haven't had too much time to see much else, but expect to make it into the city on Tuesday.  The high altitude hasn't affected me much at all, though fortunately drinking lots of water and staying hydrated I think has helped that a lot.  What HAS bothered me is the dryness.  My hands especially are getting chewed up, and I need to constantly remember to put lotion on them or else they will die.  

Time to get some rest before the 6:30am alarm goes off.  Why is it always that I get up earlier when I am on vacation than when I'm not.  Something is seriously wrong. :)  

Denver - Day 1

Thus begins a series of blogs on my 8 nights in scenic Denver, Colorado.  I'm here primarily to officiate for the US National Curling Championship / Olympic Trials.  I worked the day today then caught a 6:45pm flight, which departed a few minutes late, but other than that was relatively uneventful.  

Arriving in Denver, I was greeted with sub-freezing temperatures.  All indications were that it had snowed earlier in the evening.  So after my luggage finally coming out, I headed outside to catch the shuttle to the rental car place (which is not so conveniently nowhere near the actual terminal).  After waiting outside in the 22-degree or so cold for about 15 minutes, the shuttle finally came and we made our way to the cars.  I ended up with a red Prius hybrid, at least that's what I think I unearthed when I froze my hand brushing off the layer of snow and then scraping the ice off the windshield and ungluing the wipers.  10 minutes later, I figured out how to turn on the silly car and how to use the 50 bazillion buttons and knobs.  I swear, I think this thing is more complicated than the space shuttle, and at night it looks like mission control, with the actual dashboard, plus the whole touchscreen that controls all of the audio/climate control/engine status, and then my life-saving GPS that I threw up on the dash next to it.  Finally we had liftoff, and I zipped out of the parking lot and on my way (getting something on the order of 40 mpg).  So then I had about 35 miles to get to Broomfield, not realizing that the shortest distance between two points involved toll roads.  $13 in tolls later, just after midnight local time I managed to made it to the hotel.  

Now the hotel I got on Hotwire.  If I was going to be here 8 nights, I wasn't going to pay a whole lot a night.  So with my luck, I ended up with an inn just a mile away from the ice arena where the competition would be.  The front desk closes at 10, but they had left an envelope with my room key out front (there are only 16 rooms here) and I made my way into the nice warm room without any problem.  This room is about as nice as some studio apartments.  King-sized bed, sink, microwave, minifridge, couch, gas fireplace, internet... can't complain too much for the $45/night I'm paying when the going rate for the room is about $129.  I'll take some pictures later.  

Well, at this, I need to get up in just over 7 hours.  Day 2 will continue tomorrow with the opening ceremony and first day of competition.  It should be interesting to see the arena all set up for curling.  

Updates!

Well, it's been a long and eventful holiday season... one that has had countless situations I've been intending to blog about, but never the motivation to do so.  Trying to summarize all the way back to the snow will be a challenge, but I'll try to give you the highlights. 

Christmas was good.  The traditional family gathering on Christmas Eve was postponed due to the trecherous driving conditions and snow, but I did make it down to my parents' house for the day.  My car performed admirably, until on the way home after dropping my sister off at her house, a mere mile from my house, the lights on my dashboard lit up like a Christmas tree and I knew something must be wrong.  But more on that later.

Christmas Day the entire family came over to my house.  It was a nice day, despite even more fresh snow falling in the morning.  I took my morning to shovel out a couple of parking spots on the street, and then everyone showed up for the day.  Lots of food, good times, not much to complain about I'd say.  

Day after Christmas, it was time to address the car issues that I knew were going to be a problem.  Determining that there was some sort of problem with the electrical system, I considered the distinct possibility that my car battery needed replacing.  The battery was original to the car, which is now about 8 years old, so it's reasonable to assume it's time to be replaced.  Driving over to Schuck's, I made my way through the slushy mess that was the street, and as I was a block away from the store, heard my engine begin to sputter, as one-by-one each electrical component in my car began to shut down.  Pulling into the parking lot, the car died completely, not to start again.  With the help of some folks, I was pushed into a parking space, where I proceeded to buy a new battery and replace it there in the parking lot, as the snow began to fall again.  After finishing that, the car started up just fine, though the warning lights on the dash remained.  The worker at Schuck's brought out a tester, and determined that as I had suspected likely, my alternator was certifiably dead.  On battery power alone, I managed to get my car driven over to the Nissan dealer just 20 blocks away, where I had taken my car before to solve the great Window Regulator Debacle.  Of course, as I attempted to pull out of the parking lot at Schuck's, my tired got stuck in the slush, necessitating me pulling the shovel out of the back seat and digging out the tires again.  But at the dealer, they took my car and I found my way to walk across the street to the transit center, grab a bus to get me within 1.4 miles of my house, where I proceeded to walk home through the snow.  Later found out that I had both a dead alternator, and a cracked radiator hose (no doubt from driving over some ice that jabbed into it).  They fixed them, and the next day I paid $750 to get my car out of hawk, and all was well.  

My week off from work was reasonably enjoyable, though I did work a couple of days to stock up on some comp time, and New Year's was also fun.  Then we come to last weekend, where my comp time came in handy as I took Thursday and Friday off to be Chief Umpire for the USCA West Regional Curling Qualifier for the Olympic Trials.  As my math works out, I was at the curling club for about 65 hours over 4 days, but had a good time for the most part.  Met lots of great curlers from around the country, and despite the average of about 6-hours of sleep each night, managed to enjoy myself.  

And now, after a month where I had so little downtime it's hard to remember the last time I took a night off, I have a night off.  But I leave you with this random rant:  

Do the legislators in King County have anything better to do than pass these ridiculous laws requiring calories information posted on menus in all restaurants?  There is nowhere I can go without seeing ridiculous information I have no desire to know, let alone care about.  I do not want to know how many calories there are in my large curly fries from Jack In The Box.  All it makes me do is go "hmmm, that's interesting" and proceed to order them anyway.  Knowing fast food is bad for you didn't stop me from eating it before, so why would I stop eating it now that I see this (admittedly large) number posted on the menu.  As far as I'm concerned, the only number I should see on the menu when I pull up to the drive-thru window is the one with a dollar sign next to it.  

So listen to me King County.  I'm going to thank you.  Not for trying to use numbers to try to dissuade me from eating foods that might be bad for me, but for giving me the power to use those numbers to know exactly which foods I WANT to eat.  From now on, I'm going to religiously look at those calories numbers, and know definitively that the higher the calories, the tastier and more satisfying the food will be.  And that's what it's all about.  

Crazy Weekend

There will be a short and long part of this report. The short is my weekend report. I was down in San Jose, California for a summer curling bonspiel. Despite the fact that we won 1 and lost 3 games, we had a great time. One of the advantages to losing out early was that we had the whole day Sunday free to do what we wanted. We decided to drive down to Monterey, visited the aquarium (which for my avid blog readers, is on par with the excellence of the Tennessee Aquarium from my last trip), did some shopping down Cannery Row, and then drove down to Pebble Beach and checked out the golf courses and scenic drive.

Flash back to earlier in the day... I get a call from a family friend who has been looking after my parents' house while they were on vacation... their house was broken into. My parents were in Turkey, without any way to contact them until they got home today, and with me down in the Bay Area, I was fortunately able to get a hold of my sister eventually and she went down to help take care of things at the house.

After further assessment, these were decidedly amateur crooks. They broke a bedroom window to get in, after not being able to find an easy way in. They didn't really ransack the place like you'd typically expect... however, they stole some jewelry, silverware, two TVs and a laptop computer. Oh, and to top things off, they took my mom's minivan too (they probably needed something to haul away the stuff in). So after the police to wrote up the report, and CSI:FW processed the crime scene and got some nice fingerprints from the window, they cleaned up a bit of the mess around and the police put out a stolen vehicle alert on the car.

On to today... my parents got back and we told them about what happened. They made it home and took inventory of what was missing and worked on getting things back in order. The insurance folks will call tomorrow to take care of everything.

But wait, there's more! About 9:00pm, less than 30 hours after the incident was reported, they get a call from the FWPD: they've found the stolen van parked at the Denny's on 320th (all of about 3 minutes from my parents house) and asked them to come over to take a look. Apparently these crooks ARE as stupid as they seemed to be. After arriving, they found 3 or 4 police cars surrounding the parking lot and apparently they had two suspects in custody. Unfortunately, most of the loot was no longer in the van, but they suspect it's all close by. After some waiting around for CSI:FW to process the car and get any fingerprint evidence they could, they actually drove the car back home. The car seems to be in good shape, though apparently the police found a crack pipe among other things in the car, and recommended they get it professionally cleaned, which insurance should take care of. In the meantime, the police apparently have already recovered a few things (mainly jewelry-type stuff) off the suspects.

As of the last update, one suspect is in jail being interrogated, one suspect is at the hospital, probably handcuffed to the bedrail, after an untimely run in with one of Federal Way's four-legged finest in the FWPD K9 unit. It sounds as if justice may be served afterall.

Another update...

Curling season is finally over. After a weekend where I curled at 2pm and 2am on Saturday night/Sunday morning, it's a good time to take a 6-month break from throwing rocks at houses. Another fun, yet surprisingly long season. I think the added complications of buying a house and moving in the middle of the season made it feel much longer than it really was. But on the bright side, I now have a much more relaxing summer lined up. The season was a resounding success, with my defending-champion Friday night team coming in a resounding 2nd place, yet my Thursday and Monday teams firmly in the "also ran" category.

In two weeks I'll be heading down to the South to visit Andrew. It's been nearly 2 years since I went down there, whereas he's been up to visit all of us in Seattle about 3 or 4 times (or maybe more, I've lost count). I'll be celebrating Confederate Memorial Day in Alabama, which will probably be a non-event down there, but at least interesting. Of course, in my constant frugality, I saved money by building the most convoluded flight itinerary down and back. I'll be leaving Thursday morning and fly to San Francisco, then to Charlotte NC, then to Birmingham. On the following Tuesday I'll go from Birmingham, to Charlotte, to Chicago, and finally home to Seattle. About 6000 miles criss-crossing the country for the low, low price of just $235. I don't mind too much... at least that's what I say now. :)

Work is going well. My new commute averages about 25 minutes, which is probably about the top of my tolerance zone, but acceptable. I think I'll enjoy the commute a bit during the summer when I can enjoy the nice weather while I'm driving home. The only part I don't enjoy is that I'm filling up the gas tank much more frequently now... add in the occasional drive down to visit the parents and it's even worse. But at this point, given the state of the bus system here that would add another 30-45 minutes each way to my commute, the time and flexibility of driving is more valuable to me. They really need to expand the light rail, even if it'll be 10 years for them to finish it. That's what I say.

Now I just need to figure out what new and fun things to do during the summer. Perhaps another attempt to get motivated to improve my golfing skills is in order. I need to actually get myself over to the driving range more often, just to remind myself how dismal my skills are. Or maybe something else is in order. We'll see.

Holiday Madness

I appear to have been in another of my predictable blog droughts. It's not that there hasn't been enough going on, in this case there's probably been too much going on. As a result, this blog is brought to you by Google Calendar: "The only way to know what all you did the past month!"

• Went to two musicals plus the Seattle Symphony's holiday pops concert. All of which deserve their own reviews, but may or may not get them. We'll see how much time I make for them today.
  
• Lots of curling, culminating with a break from actually curling, only to be the head official for the state junior curling championships this past weekend. Being both competent and willing to volunteer is a dangerous combination. Tiring but a lot of fun.
  
• Started the process of looking for a house. I'm sick of my apartment, and after waiting for a year or so until the market is finally right, it's time to buy a house. Now I just have to find the right place. Once the new year starts, it should be prime time for people to start selling decent places again... I hope.
  
• Christmas came and went, and New Year's is here. I don't think I really realized Christmas was coming until about the Friday before. Things have been a bit hectic.
  
• How can I forget how this all started? The day I got home from vacation in Hawaii (well, actually the day before I got back to work), my company decided to lay off 18 people, including half of my team. I was spared, but half of my friends and coworkers were told their last day was December 12th. It's made for quite the uninspiring holidays around the office. Fortunately a few of us insisted on making things a bit cheerier and helped decorate the office for the holidays. I strung my customarily tacky Christmas, er, Secular Festive Non-Denominational Culturally-Inclusive Wintertime Holiday Lights, throughout my aisle of cubes and from the ceiling and all. It was quite nice. Regardless, unless things drastically change around work, 2008 may become time to look for a new place to work.
  
• And yes, I know I'm behind on Amazing Race episode blogs. Legs 6, 7, and 8 are all on my DVR waiting to be watched, I've just had more important things to do. At least this way I can just sit down and watch them all at once one of these days.

I am a blogging slacker!

You know how it is when you get out of the habit of doing something, you tend to forget about it completely. Yes, such is my blog. When I'm not on vacation, I tend not to remember to put anything interesting here. BUT... today I shall change that. Today is the first day of the rest of my blog. Or something.

Did you notice how in that entire first paragraph, I had a lot of words and almost zero information. That's space filler, folks. Now for a barrage of updates:

• Since I never really wrapped up my last vacation blog... yes, I made it home from Upstate New York. I posted the last few pictures I had previously forgotten to upload. Really nothing other than some long plane riding adventures complete the trip blog, and I actually do have one final blog entry that I scribbled down on a piece of paper while sitting on the plane on the way home. I'll probably get that posted in the next couple of days.
• Speaking of vacation, while posting the last of my vacation pictures, I also threw in some pictures from work I took one day when I happened to have my camera. Not too enthralling, but if you've ever wondered where I spend at least 40-hours a week, that can serve as a little glimpse into my world. Also on the topic of pictures, I still have a slew of pictures from Emily and Nathan's wedding in Yakima that I have yet to post. Maybe by their first anniversary I'll get around to that. Hmmm.
• Speaking of weddings, yet another wedding in the "Year of a Million Weddings" continues this weekend with Cat and Aaron's wedding. Fortunately, this is one of the few that don't require me travelling long distances to go to. And this time, lots of people will be in town this weekend for the festivities. Plus, on Friday night myself and a bunch of friends are going to the Seattle Symphony for their Sci-Fi Concert featuring music as expected, plus a laser light show (in Benaroya Hall, that should prove interesting) and narration by none other than George Takei, whom I last saw at a Husky halftime show riding around in a cardboard USS Enterprise that made me fear for his safety. Hmmm... should be interesting.
• Speaking of football, another season of Husky Football is once again upon us. After a 2-0 start to the season, the Dawgs had a sloppy game against Ohio State to come back to 2-1. Though overall, I'm not too disappointed about the game. We still look far better than any team that's taken the field the past several years, and good potential for a decent season.
• Speaking of a decent season, another year of curling is fast approaching. That chilly pasttime that seems to consume at least 3-nights a week, 6-months out of my year, is back again. This will be my 3rd year of throwing rocks at houses, plus to add to the mayhem, I agreed to take over as the league manager for the Friday night league. That should actually be more fun than not, though of course, yet another thing to add to my plate of things to do.
• Speaking of things to do, next weekend (after this one) I'm heading down to Disneyland for the weekend. I'm trying to squeeze out a bit of extra mileage out of my Annual Pass I got last October, and found next weekend to be the best time to do it. Not sure who else may show up as well... Amy may go down if she "has nothing better to do," and Heather may drive down from Encino to hang out with me for one of the days. But of course, it'll be fun no matter what. It's actually often easier to get around by myself, when all is said and done. :)
• Speaking of being done, I think that's the last of my updates for now.

April Update

Seeing it's the 25th of April and I have yet to make a post since March 31st, we'll call this the April update, and I will endeavor to give a whirlwind tour of the month so far.

I made it back safe and sound from the bonspiel in New Jersey. (Pictures are up in my photo album.) The trip was a lot of fun, but always nice to get home from far away. Being my first trip to the East Coast (besides Florida, which everyone agrees does not count), it was quite a bit of fun. I need to go back to NYC sometime soon.

Curling wrapped up another year of fun and excitement. I curled in three different leagues this year, and my respective teams did reasonably well in all three of them. My Sunday night team was runner-up in the B division, which was a victory considering how bad we did the first half of the season. My Thursday night team won the C division, and my Friday night team won the A division. [A note about the divisions: the general pattern for curling leagues are that at the beginning of the season, teams are randomly assigned into pools and play teams in their own pool. Half way through the season, for a two-division league anyway, the teams in the top half of each pool are put into the A division, and the bottom-half of each pool become the B division. That way in the second half, theoretically you're playing teams that more closely match your skill level. Still, winning the B division is vastly preferred to, say, coming in 5th in the A division. :)]

Now that curling is done, I'm finding myself with quite a bit of spare time on my hands... which is both nice and not. It gets a bit boring sitting at home all the time, so I have to find other things to do. My current goal is to go to the driving range at least once a week and get my golf skills a step-up from deplorable to respectable. :)

I've had such a terrible track record seeing movies I want to see. I think I'm going to get NetFlix for a few months and catch up on my movie watching. For the past, oh, 2 years or so I've consistently had movies that I've seen previews for and been "I want to see that", but never did. And considering I NEVER seem to go rent movies, I think having NetFlix will convince me to actually watch them occasionally and catch up seeing movies I've wanted to. The big challenge will be setting up my queue and trying to remember all the movies I've wanted to see. We'll try it for a month or so and see how it works out.

Last week I went and saw The Light in the Piazza at the Paramount. This will be an abbreviated review, which is probably what the show deserved. I think this show is hit-or-miss as far as the audience goes... and I think it had its fair share of misses. I've determined there are really three distinct audiences for the theatre... first, people who see theatre as an art form, meant to inspire, intrigue, and promote intellectual discussion on a social commentary of the world. Second, people who want to be entertained, whether in comedy, music, lavish scenery, fantasy reality, or any combination of those. And third, people who have such low standards they would give Rachael Ray microwaving a hot pocket a standing ovation.

I definitely fall firmly into the second category, but if the show crosses-over to cover both the first and second categories, I'm just as satisfied. I don't mind the occasional inspiration, but I definitely want to be entertained or awed by a show. I WANT to be humming a tune for a week after the show. The Light in the Piazza missed the mark with a lot of the audiences. While the show loosely may have inspired or intrigued someone, I don't think that's what it was trying to do, and if it was it failed miserably. I sat next to an older lady who came in by herself, and not to stereotype, but appeared definitely to be in the first category of audience I described. About halfway through the first act I looked over and she appeared to be in the most excrutiating agony and/or half asleep. She did not return for the second act. The music was very operatic in nature, which in turn made it difficult to understand a lot of the words during the songs, as well as just wasn't toe-tapping or hummable music. I think it missed the #1 or #2 audience hits, but there are plenty of #3 audience types who were on their feet at the end as usual.

As for my ratings:

Cast - 4 stars. My lackluster satisfaction with the show was, as usual, no discredit to the actors. Outstanding cast, and well performed.
Script - 3 stars. An interesting story, though nothing spectacular.
Music - 2 stars. The music wasn't bad, but did nothing for me. What would have been a good play without music was just muddled up with added music.
Technical - 3 stars. Not much more to say about that.
Overall - 3 stars. Probably more like 2.5 stars, but I'll round up in this case. I've seen it, it was worth seeing once, but I don't need to see it again in the future.

With that review out of the way, I'm caught up to this week. Not too much going on at all. I should get back to work, then figure out what to do with the rest of my day.

Adventures in New Jersey

Our first night of curling was, shall we say, less than stellar. We lost in spectacular fashion, no doubt attributed to our incredibly poor team play. Our second game wasn't until Friday night, so during the day on Friday we took the opportunity to explore New Jersey. One of the other people I came down here with has some friends who live in Western New Jersey so we went out and visited them. We ate lunch in the nice little town of Clinton, NJ. I took quite a few pictures of the adventure, and once those get up it will be a bit more interesting.

Eventually we made it back and played our second game, which we played far better than the first game, but ultimately came up short in the last end. After two losses, it was time to win. So today (Saturday) at noonish we played our third game which we played spectacularly well and won. Now we're relaxing back at the hotel before we go back to play our next game at 6:45pm. Tonight is also the big pig roast, vegetarians need not apply. This annual event we're playing in is called the Plainfield BonSqueal, the highlight of which is the pig roast feast on Saturday night. I must say, it's starting to smell mighty tasty outside the curling club now.

Last night on the east coast, then back home Sunday evening. Just when I've finally gotten adjusted to Eastern time, I'll have to shift 3 hours back again. Monday's going to be one great day at work.

Whirlwind tour of NYC

After spending Wednesday travelling on what felt like a relatively short 5-hour flight direct from Seattle to Newark, today we don't have our first curling match until 9:30pm or so. So we ventured into the Big Apple for a whirlwind touristy tour of NYC.

We headed over to the Edison, NJ train station and took the train into the city. About 45 minutes later we arrived at Penn Station in New York City. Really, we had very few actual plans for our day, deciding rather to just go with the flow and see what we find. This worked out well, until we decided to actually try to find specific things and were thwarted at every turn. :)

From Penn Station we ventured north, past Macy's and on up to Times Square--not as thrilling as it looks on TV. After we saw what we needed there, we continued on up to Rockefeller Center and decided to take the tour up to the observation deck at the Top of the Rock. From there we had a spectacular view of the city, in all directions. We took lots of pictures, and tried to avoid being blown over by the high winds up on the roof. After that we decided to try to go out to the Statue of Liberty. Here's where the plans started to go awry.

A lady at 30 Rock told us to walk two blocks over to 49th and 7th and catch the R subway train down to the water. This we handled with relative ease. Once we were there we walked along the water until we made it to the mayhem of the Statue of Liberty ferries. Ultimately, we could easily get on a ferry out to the island, but there was no chance of actually going into the Statue of Liberty because all the tickets were gone. Apparently while it costs money to take the ferry out to Liberty Island, the actual tickets to go inside the statue are free, since it's a National Monument. Had we known this, we could have reserved tickets online before we left, but we knew not. After decided it probably wouldn't be worth it to just go over to the island, we instead decided to go visit the USS Intrepid museum, where the WWII aircraft carrier the Intrepid is docked. We took the #1 subway train back up to Times Square, then walked for what seemed to be an eternity (but in actuality about a mile) over to the water where the museum was. Continuing our bad luck, little did we know that the Intrepid museum closed back in October for a 2-year rehab. Ouch, that hurt.

Having had enough of that, we walked back to Penn Station (about a mile and a half adventure) and caught the first train back to New Jersey. That brings us to now, and it's resting time. It was fun, though definitely looking to have a plan of more things to do next time I come to NYC. This was a good once over to get my bearings and understand how the city is laid out and all fits together.

Tonight is our first game... hopefully we still can curl after those miles and miles of walking. Woohoo.

What's so wrong with a $1 coin?

This will serve double-duty of recapping my past weekend, and promoting the widespread use of the newest $1 coin. The connection will be made clear shortly.

I had a long, yet exciting weekend this past weekend as I went up to Victoria, BC for a curling bonspiel. Though I had to get up at about 4:30am to get out on the road and head up to Canada, at least I didn't have to drive, so it was a much more relaxing trip. We got on the road at about 6:00am and made it to the border by about 7:30am. There was only one lane open at the border crossing, but fortunately since it was so early even at that there were only 2 cars in front of us in line. I went up with three other guys, one of whom is actually Italian and a student doing his graduate research at the UW. As a result, we were stopped at the border and had to go inside so Canadian immigration could check out his paperwork and US Visa. I don't think they were particularly concerned with letting him in, as much as they wanted to make sure the US would let him back in when we came home. All went smoothly, and we made our way up to take the ferry across from Tsawwassen to Vancouver Island.

Curling went well, we managed to win our first game which was nice, but ultimately ended up 2-3 for the weekend. All close matches though, so we were pretty pleased, especially since the Canadian locals were far more adjusted to the ice than we were. (The differences in the ice make a huge impact on the game.) Our hotel was only about 3 blocks from the curling club, so we could walk back and forth as needed. We had a few spare hours one day that we used to walk down to the inner harbor, er, harbour, which was fun. All in all, a good weekend. We had about an hour wait at the border coming home, despite our best efforts to avoid it. We came across the truck crossing instead of the main I-5 Peace Arch crossing, which apparently had about a 2.5 hour wait. Lots of people trying to come down to the US on Sunday afternoon.

As always happens when I go to Canada, I am reminded how great the $1 and $2 coins are. The US is the only major country in the world to still have small-demonination bills in circulation, but oddly enough, most people seem fine with that. Even with the recently improved Presidential $1 coin that is now available, people still aren't using it. Some frequently-cited polls report that something like 75% of the US population prefer the $1 bill to a $1 coin, but I don't buy it. I think it's just we're stubborn and hate change... in every sense of the word. :) I for one rarely carry any change around whatsoever... but in just two days in Canada I adapted and was carrying change with me because I had to, and you know what, it wasn't that bad. Who really needs their grungy $1 bills anyway? Use the coin! I'd use the coin more, but nobody gives them as change ever, and cashiers look at you funny when you give one to them. Really, I think it's just a vocal minority opposed to eliminating the $1 bill (the same minority who are opposed to eliminating the penny, though I don't mind the penny). I say let's get rid of the $50 bill and 50-cent piece while we're at it... talk about a superfluous piece of money.

If this is vacation, why am I so tired?

va·ca·tion (vā-kā'shən, və-) n.
A period of time devoted to pleasure, rest, or relaxation, especially one with pay granted to an employee.
Hard to believe I call this a vacation so far. I have spent the majority of the last 6 days putting in about 12-16 hours per day volunteering my time officiating for the 2007 US Junior National Curling Championships which have been held this year at our curling club. It's been a pretty exciting week actually, though with four draws a day at 8, noon, 4 and 8, it's been a loooong week. The only reason I'm not up there tonight is that the 4pm and 8pm draws were for tie-breakers (if necessary)... fortunately, they were not necessary. All that's left are two semi-finals tomorrow afternoon and the finals Saturday morning. While it's been a lot of fun, the long days have not exactly been the definition of pleasure, rest, or relaxation. More like stress, drama, and sleep-deprivation. That's why I was smart enough to plan a real vacation for next week.

And that, I will talk about more later... now I'm too tired.

Sunday's over... I'm ready for a weekend...

Is it a good sign when it's Sunday night and you're thinking "when does the weekend start?"

OK, so it's not quite as bad as that, but still. I feel like it's been pretty much non-stop for the whole long weekend. Friday night I had my regular curling which wasn't so bad, but I just really wasn't much in the mood to curl. Then Saturday was another full day of curling with the mixed bonspiel. Unfortunately, that required playing 3 games on Saturday, of which my team lost all three games. It was fun, but by about 9:30 when I was done, I just came home and crashed. Sunday, well, it was a pretty normal day. Went to church in the morning, then came home and had a little time to relax before, yes, yet another night of my regular Sunday night curling league.

Last week one of my coworkers gave me a box full of old piano sheet music that she acquired when cleaning out her mother-in-law's house. Tons of sheet music with lots of classic songs from the 1920's-1960's mostly. So part of my Sunday afternoon was going through this box and finding all kinds of fun music to play on the piano. I was extra pleased to find a fair share of showtunes and movie themes, but upon further reflection, that's not too surprising. Most of the popular songs of that era were specifically from musicals and movies. What happened to that trend? Somehow I don't think 60 years from now someone will be going through a box of sheet music and stumbling onto last year's Oscar winner for best song and going "Hey, remember that classic song 'It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp'? Those were the days, they just don't make songs like they used to!" No thanks, I'll stick with "There's No Business Like Show Business" that I found in the box. :)

Ah well, time for another week of work I guess. So long weekend, it feels like I hardly knew you.

Yet another not too exciting month

Well September is nearly over... another month goes by. Since it's been nearly a month since my last completely random and uneventful blog, I'll throw out a "what's been happening" update blog.

It's Football Season
So what does that mean? Well, yet another year of Husky Football, for one. The Dawgs through some miracle are currently 3-1 overall. Somehow this team manages to win football games, though certainly not without some abysmal playing in the first half of most of their games. Those 3 wins are equal to the sum of the total number of wins in the past two seasons combined. All goes to show that there's light at the end of the tunnel for the Huskies. I marched the Varsity/Alumni game with the band, which was fun. All in all, just like everything else has been.

It's Curling Season
Yes, another curling season is getting ready to begin. My second year curling stands to be even more fun and exciting than the first. Today I helped at an open house at the curling club. I was teaching people how to curl, but so few people showed up it wasn't too much work other than just sitting around today. But there are at least 5 more open houses that I'll work at in the coming weeks, so I'm not too disappointed. Alas, the sport of curling's best advertising is when you see it on TV during the Olympics, and outside of that, you just have to be lucky enough that someone stumbled onto it in the newspaper or online.
I'll be curling in three leagues this winter, on Sunday, Thursday and Friday nights. As usual it will be a very busy time, but it's not like I have much else exciting to do most of the time, so it will be fun.

Shows and Concerts
This week was incredibly busy... somehow all my tickets lined up on the same week. On Tuesday night I went to see the musical "Bombay Dreams" at the 5th Avenue. I'd describe the plot, but I've since determined it was vastly irrelevant. The show revolves around the world of Bollywood in India, and Bollywood stars, and of course, bizarre Indian pop music. But it was entertaining, worth the price of admission, and without having much more to say about that, it received 3 out of 5 stars on my entirely-subjective, non-scientific scale.

Speaking of, I should better define my entirely-subjective, non-scientific scale which shall remain nameless until I come up with a witty and creative name for it.

5 stars - Amazing! Among the finest performances you'll find anywhere. Worth the price of admission, whatever the cost.
4 stars - Outstanding. Certainly not a disappointment, but I wasn't compelled to leap to my feet at the end of the performance.
3 stars - Entertaining. Nothing spectacular, but nothing disappointing either.
2 stars - I came. I saw. I left. Worth the price of admission, if admission were free.
1 star - Someone might like this, but not I. I wouldn't go back by choice, but not quite bad enough I'd get up and walk out.
0 stars - "Make it stop!" "Now there's two hours of my life I won't be getting back." Deporable. Nobody should be subjected to this.

Back to my week... on Wednesday night I went and saw the touring production of Wicked, the musical based on the book that is sort of a prequel to the Wizard of Oz. This show was absolutely amazing. This show had a 10 night run in Seattle and has been completely sold out for months, and there's a very good reason why. Absolutely one of the finest musicals I've seen come through town. An unconditional 5 out of 5 stars.

And last night I went down to Benaroya Hall for the Seattle Symphony's pops concert with all George Gershwin music. The highlight was the performance of Rhapsody in Blue with the guest pianist who was fabulous. The rest of the performance was also very good. This is a tough call on how many stars to give it... so I'm going to give it 4-stars. The Rhapsody in Blue performance was easily a 5-star performance, but the others were good, and didn't disappoint, though not as amazing. I need to reserve my 5-star rating, it just wouldn't be right to give it out too often. :)

With that, I've had enough to say now. There, I blogged, everyone who reads this happy now? Good. :)

As the curling season comes to a close

It's finally happening, curling season is coming to a close. This weekend is the big April Spiel, the last big tournament of the year. There are 53 teams in the spiel this weekend, with games running last night (Thursday), and then every 2-hours from Friday at noon through Sunday at 3. All day, all night. As is only proper, teams that win stay in the good brackets that don't have to play in the middle of the night, but start losing and you quickly end up playing games at 2am, 4am, or anywhere else ridiculous around there.

My team's first game was last night, we won so we are currently staying in the A-bracket and playing tonight at 6pm. Unfortunately due to the luck (or fate, in this case) of the draw, we are playing against 3/4 of the team that won the 2006 US Mixed National Championship. Of course, it's a game and anything could happen... but I suspect we may be a bit outmatched in tonight's game. If we lose, we fall to the C-bracket and play sometime Saturday morning, but if we win things are pretty good, I think.

After this, not too much more curling to do, but it's getting sunny and nice out now so maybe I'll find new and exciting things to do outside.

Long time no update...

Well it's been close to a month since I actually updated my blog. Several reasons for that I suppose...

1) I was on vacation for the 3rd week of February. Didn't go anywhere, but Andrew came to visit, so there was much fun to be had, along with the Olympics being on TV for what seemed like 24-hours a day. All in all, some much needed time off.

2) Curling has been keeping things busy. This past weekend was the annual "5 and under bonspiel" which is a curling tournament open to all curlers in their 5th year of curling or less. It was quite a fun, yet extremely exhausting weekend. Out of 15 teams, my team was 8th, which by my calculations is about as middle-of-the-pack as you can be. Still, the fun is what matters. Only a little over a month of curling season left before the 6-month hiatus.

Not much else of any significance that I can think of. Some observant blog readers may note that the Amazing Race 9 started last Tuesday, and more importantly that I made no blog of it. There's good reason for that, blogging it is too much work and I'm less than inspired at the moment. However, AR10 might see a resurrection of the blog... we'll have to see.

Now I'll have to keep up more with my blogging. I'll try to have more interesting things to say sooner than later.